Category Archives: Social Media

In a Whiteboard Friday from Moz, Rand Fishkin discusses the evolving strategies of SEO keyword targeting. He raises an interesting question; who are you targeting the page to?

In the early days of SEO, the audience was the search engine. High rankings for valuable keywords meant loading as many of those keywords on the page. Try that today and your site will receive a penalty and face a tough battle to overcome the effects of the dated black hat SEO tactic.

Current search engines, Google in particular, are extremely keen on ensuring websites are not trying to ‘game’ the system. As cliche as it sounds: ‘content is king’. Original content is an asset that offers an extremely postie return on investment.

Rand brings up a website selling shoes, in particular bowling shoes. Two ways to approach obtaining organic search traffic would be to create a large number of landing pages for every single type of shoe or create a single page with rich content explaining all of the different types of bowling shoes.

With over 232 millionactive users, Twitter is one of the top social media platforms and a component of many digital content marketing efforts. It is an advertising platform as well as a tool for organic search.

How do marketers gain the most utility from their Twitter efforts?

Besides tweeting great content in a timely manner and connecting with influencers (which requires skill), it’s easy. Make sure to use the html markup for twitter cards and post images within Twitter vs. a link or an auto-generated tweet from another social media platform.

What are Twitter Cards?

Twitter cards are html meta tags added to a particular website so that a rich snippet is attached every time an end user presses the tweet button on web content with share buttons. This adds additional content to the tweet besides the 140 character limit.

See all that additional stuff? It makes you look at the tweet just a little bit longer. Long enough for someone to read a tweet, visit the linked website, and convert. According to Twitter, these cards will send engaged traffic to a website or even an app. Most marketers generally want their followers and other Twitter users that stumble across their tweets (via optimized hashtags) to get off Twitter and head to their site. You want more people in re-marketing pool for display advertising at least!

There are several varieties of Twitter cards for different content marketing initiatives:

After adding the metatags to the website (there are plugins for WordPress that will automate), one must validate through Twitter.

How to use Twitter Inline Images?

Pictures are another way to capture attention with additional elements besides the 140 characters. Twitter is making a strategic move to limit other picture content on its platform. The only images that are able to be seen directly within Twitter are those uploaded through the site. Auto-generated tweets of pictures from Facebook, Instagram, or anywhere else are only visible as links.

Belle Cooper wrote a blog on some data behind use of inline images. The results are clear; inline images within tweets increase engagement. In these case more re-tweets which means more targeted impressions for content.

The SEO Impact

Social media and search are merging. Twitter cards and inline images are an example of a social media platform developing new technologies as tools for digital marketers to share their content and draw end users to engaging websites.

From an SEO perspective, lack of Twitter cards and zero use of images is a fail when it comes to social efforts on the platform.

Twitter is creating new ways to engage with an audience with empirical data indicating their effectiveness. Implement them now.

Google launched a new feature where users can embed public Google+ posts.

This is a great way to create blog and website content. Currently, this feature is only available on WordPress and Typepad.

Should someone come across the Google+ embedded post on your website, they can +1 or comment on the post and circle the original Google+ account. These changes are are visible in Google+. This happens the opposite way as well. All engagements on Google+ will be visible wherever the embedded post is located on a website.

From an SEO and organic search perspective, posting engaging Google+ posts will boost circles, +1’s, and overall authority of a Google+ account. It’s important to make sure posts are optimized with appropriate meta information.

This may be a key white hat SEO method of boosting future AuthorRank and AgentRank. While these updates have yet to be released, it is widely understood that Google is planning on using these undefined metrics in its proprietary search algorithm at some point.

The number of +1’s, re-shares, and circles are all metrics Google may use to compose AuthorRank and AgentRank. Embedding these posts will expose Google+ individual accounts and Google+ brand pages to additional means of accumulating these metrics.

Depending on where this content is placed within your site architecture, one may be able to funnel targeted traffic to your Google+ account. For example, if you have a niche blog, you are likely attracting niche traffic to your site. This niche traffic may have AuthorRank of its own.

Accumulating engagement metrics from accounts with high AuthorRank is logically better than premature accounts with no AuthorRank.

It is important to note that this method should be supplemental and used in tandem with posting within Google+ (ie Google+ communities).

This is a white hat SEO tactic because it logically follows the outlined use of this feature by Google. While there may be a potential spam tactic with this feature, Google+ wants this feature in use because it will probably increase the number of users on Google+.